Measuring and Exploring Factors of Shared Leadership in the Context of Indian IT Sector

Introduction

Shared leadership is understood as a concept which involves completing of tasks together by teams. Under this the team members not only interact frequently but also provide emotional support to each other. Through this process the team members help each other to develop their skills (Shane Woods, 2005). Shared leadership is seen as a team level phenomenon (Blings, Pearce and Kohles) or team property (Carson 2007), enacted by multiple individuals (Blings, Pearce and Kohles). In this leadership style single leader is not the focus rather all the team members have their share in leadership process (Carson 2007). Research suggests that as the knowledge content of work will increase, shared leadership will become more relevant. As Greenberg -Walt and Robertson (2001), put it ' Knowledge work facilitates shared leadership and shared leadership facilitates knowledge work.' Since the tasks are becoming more specialized and technical, sharing responsibility and decision making is a logical repercussion. The multi-disciplinary team have become very relevant in the present times and especially in the IT sector due to increase in the frequency of changes and complexities related to job and technology. Here the complex problem-solving process require various experts to deal with different facets of the job. For example, software development in IT companies like Infosys, H.C.L., Wipro, Ericsson, etc., require a cross-functional team consisting of experts including software developers, domain experts, testers, customer supporters, technical communicators and representatives from sales, manufacturing and marketing. Such a dynamic and knowledge-intensive, fast moving and quick response demanding environment has made a single leader not only inadequate to provide leadership on all facets of the complex job but also incapable to come up with timely solutions. Sharing of responsibility among the team leaders is situational requirement in the IT sector working. The logic for exploring of shared leadership in IT sector is that dimensions like multidisciplinary team, knowledge working, interdependency of team members on each other, mutual help, etc., exist in the IT sector companies.

In education and medical fields, researchers as well as practitioners have showed a lot of interest in study and application of shared leadership. The in-depth literature survey on shared leadership has brought to light the fact that there is need for extension of study of shared leadership into domains other than healthcare and education. This paper is also an attempt to explore Shared Leadership in a newer area, the Indian IT sector.

There have been many attempts in the recent past to construct a reliable and valid instrument for estimating shared leadership in teams in organizations. The Team Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (T.M.L.Q.), the shared Leadership Questionnaire(S.L.Q.), Questionnaire by Hiller, Day and Vance (2006), SPLITS (2015), etc. are some of such scales to name. Thus, several scholars (Alvio, Shivasubramanium, Garner, Murry, Hoch, Dolebohn, Pearce, Hiller, Day, Vance, Grille, Kauffeld, etc.) have also made attempts to reduce the large numbers of variables, related to leadership, into few manageable factors or components. This can help better conceptualization of the construct under study and also reliable and valid data collection by researchers. The originality of this study lies in the fact that there are hardly any study explaining shared leadership construct in the context of Indian IT sector. There are several research papers on leadership and shared leadership describing leadership concepts with the help of several variables. The large number of variables undertaken for study were picked from many sources but mainly from research articles and books on shared leadership which explained the concepts of shared leadership and its various determinants or constituent elements. Various research papers, many relating to developing the instruments for assessing the shared leadership, were also analyzed. This research paper is an endeavor to develop a scale to measure shared leadership.